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Groklaw Summarizes the Lori Drew Verdict
Bootsy Collins writes "Last Wednesday, the Lori Drew 'cyberbullying' case ended in three misdemeanor convictions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 US Federal law intended to address illegally accessing computer systems. The interpretation of the act by the Court to cover violations of website terms of service, a circumstance obviously not considered in the law's formulation and passage, may have profound effects on the intersection of the Internet and US law. Referring to an amicus curiae brief filed by online rights organizations and law professors, PJ at Groklaw breaks down the implications of the decision to support her assertion that 'unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer.'"
She's an asshole, but this is a bullshit conviction and as the article describes....it hurts everybody.
America is a country of Laws, until butthurt turds scream for revenge. Then fuck the law and rational application of said law...we's gonna get some revenge!
Bye bye free speech...
Blar.
I'm all for the rule of law making it so the weak and the strong have equal standing in society.. but crying to the courts because someone called your daughter a name and she killed herself is just bullshit. It's just like all this sensitivity shit in the workplace and the restrictions on speech at colleges now. Grow a spine.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Everyone from AOL on - get the hell off.
Replace AOL with "whistleblowers" or any other group... and you'll get the real reason why this case most likely won't be overturned.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I agree, but there was no need for this.
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
A 49yo woman subjects a 13yo neighbor to humiliation and emotional torment. Why wasn't this prosecuted as a case of felony child abuse?
I value PJs contributions to the open source movement, in terms of her legal coverage, but she does have a tendency to go off the deep end sometimes, and I think this is one of those occasions.
The internet has no privacy whatsoever, everything you do can be tracked. This has been true since day one when they turned on ArpaNet, and it will continue to be true. Even if you encrypt your traffic, it can't hide heavy usage, and you cannot hide from your ISP when you are online any more then you can hide making a phonecall from your telecom provider.
People need to realise this and move on. I realise it, and I can cope, but then I never was inclined to tinhattery.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
First off; you know damned well and good that this will be overturned on appeal. It can't be allowed to stand because the interpretation is skewed to begin with. Secondly; This article reads as a scare tactic to shut down the Internet. Come on; get real.
This lady is bad. But there are way to many others of like kind out there and to tie this all together like that is just crappy thinking and reasoning. The kid did have emotional issues that were an underlying complicit part of this formula. Now lets all come back to earth.
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WTF? She pretended to be an "internet boyfriend" and then told the girl she didn't want to talk to her anymore. She didn't put rat poison in her coffee. No-one is responsible for the death of a person who commits suicide, except the person who commits suicide. Oh, no, life is too hard. A boy I've never met (and didn't even really exist) doesn't like me anymore, where's the sleeping pills?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Make a new law, call it the Lori Drew law, and have that law make what she did specifically illegal.
The prosecution twisted the existing laws, which I cannot abide. This conviction should be over-turned.
That's how our system of law works.
Blar.
Of course, had this been a man talking to a 13-year old girl and pretending to be her boyfriend......
"Have a seat over here"
without question.
Unfortunately, the thing she's guilty of wasn't actually illegal when she did it. It was immoral, indefensible, and even if she gets off on these charges(which she probably will) she's going to be punished for the rest of her life and she deserves it.
She, as an adult who should have known better, created a false identity to harrass a minor, and that minor commited suicide, at least partially as a result. She set out to hurt that little girl, and the fact that this kid was mentally ill does not excuse that.
As in all cases like this, the government had to show both the victim's family and society at large that they'd go after this sort of thing. The case will probably be overturned because the case they could put together was pretty tenuous(because there wasn't a crime for what she did), but they've shown people that they're serious about this shit.
The crime they've charged her with may not be the one she's guilty of, but she's still guilty, and she deserves everything that's coming to her and more. She's an adult, she should have known better.
And just think , if the parents had done their job and protected their little girl from a situation that was extremely harmful to her mental state (whether or not the 'boyfriend' was real or Lori drew means nothing when a high school boy could be just as bad x10000, on top of the fact that her parents, or at the very least her mother, knew exactly what was being said in the messages the two were exchanging and even had fights with her about that as well as her daughter's refusal to get off teh computer when she was told) then none of this woul dhave happened. Everyone cries THINK OF THE CHILDREN OMFG!, but no one is ever there saying 'Where the fuck were the parents?'
So? A normal, well adjusted person will immediately disregard such a statement to be false. The fact that the suicide victim was not a normal well adjusted person is not the fault of Lori Drew.
Depression is a disease. It is not the "fault" of any one person or circumstance. Blaming Lori Drew for the victim's depression would be like blaming McDonald's for heart attacks caused by fatty foods. Sure, McDonald's bears some responsibility for serving such fare, and likewise, Lori Drew bears some responsibility for her words. But does the level of responsibility rise to a criminal level? I don't think so. Just like one has the ability to choose what one eats, one also has the ability to choose what words one listens to. The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The difference between murder and manslaughter is intention, not action. Are you telling me that suddenly we should ignore this woman's intention to cause the death of another person? That's what her intention was, correct?
If I buy a vial of poison from someone but they give me harmless water yet I still try to carry out a plan to murder someone with the "poison", that is still attempted murder. Intentions have just as much to do with the law as actions.
You just hit the nail on the head. What if Lori Drew was the guy she pretended to be. Would that make it better? Would he be on trial? Lets think this through. This girl thought she was talking to a boy (mistake #1) and believed what this internet person said (mistake #2) then acted on that information (mistake #3) to her own detriment. Three strikes and you're out as they say. I have sympathy for her family, I'm not cruel, but I am realistic. If you want to believe everything you hear, your life won't last long... whether you are a teen girl or anyone else. This girl did some incredibly stupid things. Why should we blame others for that? Sure, they did aide her along, but if they had not someone else would have sooner or later.
One of the things that the law is pretty firm about is that you take responsibility for your own actions, or inaction in some cases. Why would someone else be responsible for something that this girl did all on her own? At any point she was free to not log on, to not talk to this person, and to seek help or second opinions. She fucked up. That's life. If this girl got a bad ride, as you say, her parents should have been more careful, more loving, more concerned, more involved. It's sad, and a shame, but the rest of the world should not have to pay for their mistakes. period. Yes, that all leads to school bullies and other such things. Grow a spine please. The rest of us did, or survived somehow. You can get pads on kids when they are on the playground, but how far do you go? How much protection is too much?
Should we stop building tall buildings? Should we stop building bridges? Should we stop making razor blades? If you go down that path, where does it end?
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1) People are not blaming Lori Drew for the depression in the young girl.
2) Inflicting this sort of mental anguish to someone who is clinically depressed is like feeding sugary treats by the bucket to someone with diabetes or lighting up cigarettes for someone with lung cancer.
Drew should have been put before a judge - I totally agree with that. Doing it for computer fraud is the wrong charges. If they didn't stick, she would be off scott free. If they do stick they open up the nasties can of worms on the rest of us just to punish this woman.
The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
Again, my view is that the entire thing is a tragedy, one that wouldn't have happened had people not been so mean/stupid/whatever but charging them with computer fraud is not the right way to go about righting the wrongs that they did.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
ignorance of law leads to the interpretation that the lori drew case has far reaching implications. hysteria leads to the rest
and frankly, slashhordes, if this case is your waterloo, then you don't deserve any online rights, because this case, in its proper context that anyone with the faintest understanding of law understands, has absolutely nothing to do with your online rights
you defend your rights from genuine threats to it. only ignorance, stupidity, and hysteria considers the lori drew case a threat to their rights
slashhordes are constantly tut tutting society overreacing with hysteria. now you are doing it
calm the fuck down and grow some fucking brains
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Suppose I purposefully throw a baseball at your head, hard enough to sting a normal person, but not hard enough to cause serious damage.
You happen to have an unusually thin skull, and die. It's not my fault you have a thin skull, so would you say I'm not responsible for your death?
What if I know you have a thin skull? Does that change anything?
Drew is not being blamed for the victim's depression. She is being blamed for taking actions that used that depression to kill the victim. Just like the hypothetical with my baseball and your thin skull, I would not be blamed for your thin skull--I would be blamed for throwing the baseball that killed you.
If you go around chucking baseballs at people's heads, you run the risk of running into someone with a thin skull, and then you have to pay the price. I don't see why tormenting teenage girls online should be any different. Drew wanted to harm the girl, and she happened to cause more harm then she may have intended. Too bad for Drew--that's the gamble she took, and she lost.
(The law will take into account the likelihood of a thin skull in the baseball example, so if thin skulls are so rare that a reasonable person would not consider them a possibility when deciding whether to go around chucking baseballs at people, then you might not face liability for the death. But depressed teenage girls aren't that rare, so that defense won't fly here).
PJ and groklaw have done a lot of good, but somethimes she just doesn't "get it", and goes off the deep end. This is one of those times
FTFA:
Since when doe web sites have the authority to jail anyone?
They can, like anyone else, decide whether you've violated their TOS. If they decide you have, then they either cancel your account or, if you've been doing something blatantly illegal, they can bring it to the attention of the fuzz. Same as YOU are the final authority to decide whether someone has violated YOUR rights - if you believe so, you can't send them to jail - but you CAN make a complaint to the police.
Like the whole "we must move to GPLv3 or we are doomed!" and "Novell is bad today because they made a deal with Microsoft over linux patents" when they didn't. (And don't bring up mono - nobody gives a f*ck about mono).
That's pretty close to saying that cigarette companies have nothing to do with smokers dying of cancers and other smoking related illness.
They don't.
Neither do alcohol companies have anything to do with alcohol related deaths.
Neither do car companies have anything to do with driving related deaths.
Neither do skiing companies have anything to do with skiing deaths.
What is so fucking hard to understand here? Everything has risk, if you choose to engage in an activity then it is your choice and you are responsible.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You forgot to put weapons manufacturers on your list. I mean, they take the heat for a lot of shootings, but I don't see many TV ads or billboards showing beautiful women playing with guns in an effort to make gun ownership sexy. It's not like the fast food companies, SUV makers and tobacco companies that spend billions of dollars in marketing, convincing us to fuck ourselves over for their benefit. I mean, yes they sell lethal tools, but it's the customer that pulls the trigger.
... sue. Shoot your wife dead ... sue the gun maker. Get diabetes ... sue a fast food company. Break into your school and end up a paraplegic ... sue the school. All that because obviously they (whoever they might happen to be) should somehow have stopped you. Some lawyers like that, because it means they get to sue the pants off deep-pockets corporations, and people like it because they don't have to own up to anything, and can maybe get society or some corporation to pay for their own poor judgment.
Now, tobacco companies have been held responsible for cancer deaths because they deliberately withheld knowledge that their product caused that disease, and point-blank lied about it (to the courts and to the public.) Might have been different if they'd been open and honest about their products' effects. Now, to my way of thinking smoke inhalation is a bad idea anyway, but whatever. People fell for it, are still falling for it.
But in general, I agree. Look at our recent history: everything has been about shifting responsibility (and blame) for our own actions onto other people or organizations. Hot coffee spills in your lap
Makes me sick. Not the America I grew up in, or thought I grew up in.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
intentional infliction of emotional distress is already a tort.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
That's the thing. This ruling says that violating the ToS on a website is in itself a federal crime.
The idea is that there is a law saying that "unauthorized access to a computer" is considered hacking and is federal crime. Because Lori Drew violated the Terms of Service, her access to myspace's servers were unauthorized, therefore, she gets convicted of computer hacking.
That's the only thing she was actually convicted of: Violating Myspace's Terms of Service. As various articles have pointed out, treating a terms of service violation as a federal offense is absurd. If someone under 18 does a google search (google's ToS says you need to be 18), do they deserve to spend a year in jail? According to this ruling, they violated the Terms of Service, and that alone is computer abuse, and they're guilty.
If there's anything more important than my ego around, i want it caught and shot now.
First, I think the girl was emotionally/mentally unstable to begin with. Most teenagers have emotional problems they have to work out, some more so than others.
Second, I think the people who's actions resulted in the suicide of the girl need to be punished..which is happening.
Depression is a REAL disease, and it isn't just being sad. Its where your entire worldview is skewed towards the negative. Like if your friend had to cancel some plans you had made, you might think that it was your fault or maybe they just didn't want to be around you. People think that its just being sad, but being sad is more like a number on a -10 to +10 chart of emotion, whereas depression would be like a chart of -20 to +5.
You can bet that if some people asked a retarded person to do something dangerous that resulted in the retarded person being injured or killed, people would be all over that one. They weren't in the mental capacity to see the consequences, just like the girl in this story wasn't in the emotional capacity to deal with the assholes that did this to her.
Had it been a boy really breaking up with her, no charges would have been pressed. But since the motive (revenge/humiliation) was established and intent to harm was also established, its time for them to pay the piper.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Web sites and their owners can't jail anyone directly. But this ruling provides a way to turn TOS violations into criminal offenses, given nothing else but a police department willing to charge you and a jury willing to convict. Do something unpopular but otherwise legal and you could be targeted.
I'm sure Lori Drew could be charged and convicted with something related to what she actually did wrong. Maybe not -- and if not, then she ought to go free...
There are plenty of loopholes that authorities could use to arrest anyone they want. They all stink. This is one of them.
Are you a doctor? Because as far as I know depression is exactly the disease where one is unable to choose to be happy and ignore the bad things that happen to everybody.
The fact that the victim chose to listen to her is no fault of Lori Drew's.
Drew's daughter and the victim had been friends. Drew knew the victim was clinically depressed. Drew did this because the victim said something "mean" about her daughter.
An adult knowingly harassed an unstable child.
Is that really okay with you? Do you really think that's acceptable behavior for an adult?
Driving is fun.
Skiing is fun.
Alcohol is a whole hell of a lot of fun.
Cigarettes are also fun, just ask a teenager.
Your problem is that freedom and personal responsibility scares you.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's been several months since I researched things on this, but in the official reports, the girl killed herself after an argument with her mother over her excessive internet use. The media and people crying for Lori Drew's blood ignore this (well, many of the people online probably never knew about it) when it shows that if anyone besides the girl is to blame, it was her PARENTS. Lori Drew may have hurt someone's feelings (not a crime yet), but to claim that she had anything to do with the girl killing herself is bullshit. Lori Drew is a scapegoat that the parents pushed the blame onto.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
But your actions have an effect on society. Who do you think has to pay for those police officers, firemen, and medical emergency responders, who are needed to clean up after all the drug overdoses, car accidents, and fire starters?
We are all connected. You can argue that the heroin dealer has no responsibility for the dead addict, or the crimes that they commit to feed the habit, but I doubt the families of the addict, or the victims of their crimes, will agree with you. Saying that everybody has a choice, whilst technically true, ignores the fact that people are flawed, that even the best of us fail to live our lives as beings of perfect reason, and that certain sensory perceptions like drugs and unprotected sex, whilst obviously risky, suddenly become more attractive when rational reasoning is broken down by desire, alcohol, and other temptations. Sure, everybody has a choice, but there are ways to structure society to change the probability of people making certain choices. And if that were not true, then there would be no point in having laws in the first place.
In the US, our constitution provides protection against cruel and unusual punishment, such sentences cannot be made.
In colonial times there were punishments like stocks and pillory.
But nowadays it's unconstitutional to lock a prisoner up in the middle of town and allow citizens to abuse criminals by insulting, spitting upon, throwing objects at, etc.
Alcohol and cigarettes have no function apart from bodily harm. People who sell these things are selling bodily harm.
Don't be silly. Of course they have functions apart from bodily harm. Nobody drinks to hurt themselves, they drink because it feels good, because it releases inhibitions, because it helps them sleep, whatever. People smoke because it makes them feel better, gives them something to fiddle with, etc.
Yes, people who sell those things are selling bodily harm. So are motorcycle manufacturers, fast food joints, and the company that makes B-1 bombers. Only the last of those items is specifically intended to cause bodily harm.
Guilty of what exactly?
You and I are not bound by any particular relationship here. So if I tell you it would be a good idea for you to kill a puppy, and then you go kill a puppy, for what am I to be held accountable? I didn't help you kill the puppy. I didn't make any decision for you. You should know that killing puppies is inherently harmful. That leaves us with the crime of hurting someone else's feelings.
That's the crime that has been committed here. Emotional abuse, not murder.
Sure, mob justice solves loads of problems. It's quick and it's easy, too! Why don't we replace our judicial system with mob justice? Just get rid of this 'cruel and unusual' restriction, get rid of judges, lawyers, and replace blind justice with blind rage.
Sounds like a real winner, there.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The doctrine of the thin-skulled plaintiff only applies to damages. It cannot create liability for an act that is not a tort to begin with.
Yeah yeah... ;-). I'm more interested in the ethics of it than the law. To the extent that the notion of "you take your victim as you find him" makes any sense, Lori Drew can be reasonably held accountable for her actions.
The moral question should not be "if Lori Drew targeted a normal person, would they have died?" The fact is that she targeted an especially vulnerable person who died as a result.
Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person--just because a person with full sight could avoid it doesn't make it OK. You all learned it in Sunday School.
See "reductio ad absurdum".
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I don't see many TV ads or billboards showing beautiful women playing with guns in an effort to make gun ownership sexy
They don't have to. Practically every movie and TV show out there is doing the advertising for them.
Look, the fact is, if The Man wants to get you, The Man will get you. It doesn't matter what the laws are, exactly - they'll find something to hit you with.
That was true before the Lori Drew trial, and it's true now. The precedents set by this case in no way make being on the internet one bit more "risky". If you don't do anything to bring down the wrath of The Man, you'll be fine. And if you do, you're screwed, online or off.
Back in the days where people were like "gee, I don't know if cigarettes are bad for me" you could blame the tobacco companies for not doing enough to find out how dangerous their product is. But now, everyone knows that cigarettes cause cancer. The link is firmly established in the public's psyche. Yet people still smoke.
If you don't know by now that eating junk food is bad for you then you should listen to your mother more. It's called junk food for a reason.
Sky diving is dangerous. Skiers get broken legs. Everyone knows this stuff, and yet they still do it.
Driving is dangerous, yet we do it every day. Driving is likely the most dangerous thing the average civilian will ever do, and they do it every day. Life is risk. We're all going to die someday. Get over it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And if you don't punish someone who's found a loophole in law to commit murder (in the minds of the people at least), then you run the risk of people doing that by themselves. The more it happens, the less likely they are to even bother with the courts any more; they'll just hire a contract killer and be done with it.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do. In Hell or in Abyss, in D&D cosmology...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Although I agree that Lori had no control over what Megan decided to do, I do have to disagree with a major point of your post. Megan had depression, and that severely reduced her ability to make rational decisions, especially in situations of extreme stress. As someone who has severe depression myself, I know that when I would have a mental breakdown, before my years of treatment, I would have very little to no control over what I did in that period of time. For someone to be aware of this and exploit it is inexcusable. We can put a gun in front of a toddler, and sure, the toddler doesn't HAVE to play with it... But if you know that the toddler doesn't understand the consequences and you do it anyway, who is responsible for their death? Lori Drew cannot say that she did not mean to cause harm in this case. Unfortunately enough, people do need to be protected from themselves because people do choose to make poor decisions. Where to draw the line is debatable (I personally think that freedoms are wonderful things to have and that restrictions should only be placed in cases where there is an immediate and present danger) but if we allowed everyone in America to own nuclear weapons on the basis that they are responsible for what they choose to do with them is utter nonsense because there are people that cannot be trusted to make a rational decision with such power. To blame the victim after everything she suffered through is quite cruel. I hope that her family and friends can find some sort of peace after all is said and done.
And if you cannot charge and convict someone under such laws without twisting them beyond all recognition and creating an incredibly dangerous precedent, then you should not do so at all.
The price of justice is that occasionally you have to let a major-league asshole walk free. That's a price I'm willing to pay, and it shocks me that so many people on Slashdot -- which at election times is a hotbed of libertarianism -- suddenly become all in favor of activist judges in cases like this.
As for serverco retroactively ruling conduct "unauthorized", there's a panoply of affirmative defenses such as invitation, habitual tolerence, failure to notify, discriminatory enforcement. Cyberbullying wouldn't have those available.
The crime Lori Drew was convicted of was "unauthorized access to a computer system to access information". Nothing about cyberbullying. (She was also charged with "intent to inflict emotional distress" but was acquitted by the jury).
The terms of service she broke were the ones that require you to supply correct personal information. Nothing about cyberbullying.
Myspace habitually tolerates incorrect personal information. It does little or nothing to police whether or not the information its users supply is correct, and there is probaby a very high percentage of users who have supplied incorrect information.
Myspace did not notify Drew that she had violated the terms of service, and hence was not authorized to access the system.
This is the only case where such an event has been prosecuted so far, and it has been selected on a basis that has little or nothing to do with the nature of the supposed crime that was committed. Sounds like discriminatory enforcement to me.
If any of those defenses were appropriate, they would all have been used in this case, and Drew wouldn't be looking at up to 3 years in jail for, essentially, being an arsehole.